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APRIL 2016 •
PPB
• 53
TALKING POINT No. 1:
What are they really trying to
accomplish, and how are they
measuring success?
Marketing campaigns lack
relevance when they lack reso-
nance. What good are touch
points if recipients don’t notice
or feel connected? That’s why
smart, data-driven strategies
matter. They make it possible to
deliver the right message to the
right customer at the right time
through the right channel.
But here’s the thing: The
right strategy doesn’t start with
slick technology or a slick
agency. It begins with the cus-
tomer—its marketing goals and
whatever business challenges
keep employees up at night. An
end user’s interactive marketing
services partner needs to under-
stand those goals and challenges
before addressing them. (See
“Cut, Paste and Send This to
Clients: Choosing an Interactive
Marketing Services Partner.”)
Any marketing team can tell
customers what they need to
know. Great ones take a different
approach; they create ways to lis-
ten and learn, constantly building
relationships and developing con-
versations with their customers or
members. In that sense, the right
marketing services partner wears
the same color jersey as its
client’s team, collaborating on
effective ways to marry data, tac-
tics and technology.
Here’s an example: A univer-
sity sought a better way to edu-
cate high school sophomores and
juniors about the school. Timely,
compelling outreach is a main
goal of the school’s admissions
leaders. But like most higher-
education institutions, the uni-
versity lacked an efficient, simple
way to target and engage
prospective students and then
track the success of those efforts
by viewing a live dashboard.
A marketing services
provider deployed a multifaceted,
segmented campaign that
included:
•
A series of six marketing
emails to prospective stu-
dents.
Messaging reinforced
the school’s advantages and
included links to its website
and downloadable collateral.
The design was customized
based on each recipient’s aca-
demic area of interest.
Interested students were taken
to a landing page that included
a form to fill out so the uni-
versity could learn more about
interested students. Follow-up
emails were sent automatically,
triggered by action or inaction.
•
Customized direct mail and
personalized landing pages.
Prospective students who
expressed interest received a
customized direct-mail piece
based on answers provided on
the landing page.
•
A dashboard for integrated
campaign tracking
. The uni-
versity could easily track the
success of the campaign as a
whole, or each touch point
individually. Its marketing
leaders could view who sub-
mitted information, which tac-
tics worked the best, the suc-
cess rates of email and direct
mail and much more. Those
leaders could also see how stu-
dents accessed the landing
page (via smartphones, specific
browsers, etc.). Comparing
interactive campaign data with
demographic data, the univer-
sity also knew what ethnicity
the responders were and what
regions they were located in.
TALKING POINT No. 2:
An interactive marketing strat-
egy isn’t tangible unless it’s
trackable.
Marketers are facing business
challenges that didn’t exist even
five years ago. For example,
greater power is placed in the
hands of customers today.
Because so many options exist
for online interaction—social
channels, websites, mobile, email
and others—customers can selec-
tively choose when, where and
how they interact with a brand.
In effect, people are always “on.”
Amid this communication
deluge, marketing teams are try-
ing to gather and utilize various
sources of information to better
understand customers—their
needs, behaviors, buying patterns
and preferences. The ability to
reach targets “where they are,”
and to gather and understand
data about them, is the founda-
tion of successful interactive
marketing efforts.
Think of it this way:
Marketers are armed with a box
full of pins. What’s missing is
the pincushion—a distributor
partner that can tie together
data, technology and strategy.
Today, however, countless
organizations are managing
incoming data from online and
offline sources manually—sort-
ing, cleansing and normalizing it
using spreadsheets, and then
uploading information into mar-
keting automation and sales sys-
tems. Data quality can be severely
affected by this approach.
Think of it this way:
Marketers are
armed with a box
full of pins. What’s
missing is the pin-
cushion—a distribu-
tor partner that can
tie together data,
technology and
strategy.